Customer councils = customer research on autopilot

There is a lot of overhead that goes into setting up customer interviews. Finding & recruiting the participants, scheduling time in, ensuring availability of stakeholders, and paying out incentives to make sure folks show up.

Most teams can appreciate the value in regular customer interviews but the bar is so high that research doesn't happen as much as they'd like.

Today we're introducing Customer Councils - the easiest way to make customer research a part of every product sprint.

Customer Councils lets you create a recurring customer research event, with a new customer booked in every time to tell you their story, answer your questions, and give you feedback on what you're building.

We automate the recruitment & scheduling of customers from your Great Question customer research panel, and make sure there's always a customer ready to go for every Council. We even handle paying out an incentive to thank them for their time, and give them a great reason to show up.

If you were Shopify for example you might setup a Customer Council for every second Thursday at 10am to interview a recently signed up merchant to learn about what they're selling, what made them choose Shopify, and how the onboarding experience has been going.

You can then invite your teammates along to watch or participate - everyone from product managers to designers, marketers and engineers.

We've found it incredible helpful as a way to establish a consistent research practice, with time blocked out on our calendars in advance, and it creates a great outlet for those gnarly questions that come up in every product release.

Customer Councils goes out in beta mode today - if you're an existing customer of Great Question you can send me an email to get access at ned@greatquestion.co. If you're not yet a customer you can sign up for a demo of the product and to find out more here.

Ned